This invention relates to an electronic document circulating system and more particularly to an electronic document circulating system utilizing a communication management system and a file sharing system in a network system.
Heretofore, as the electronic document circulating system can utilize any document, a circular route or path of a document is defined in order of duties such as "preparation", "examination", and "approval" and a plurality of users who perform operations corresponding to the "preparation", the "examination and the "approval" are previously defined in a duty table separately from the definition of the circular route. For example, JP-A-2-278458 discloses an electronic document circulating system in which when a document is to be transmitted to a user who performs an operation corresponding to the "examination", a transmitting person or a transmitter changes a designation of a user at a transmission destination if necessary on the basis of a list of users at circular destinations automatically determined in accordance with a previously defined decision rule of circular destination and the user then responds to a system to thereby complete the transmission of the document to the user. The decision rule of circular destination is information capable of hanging the designation of the user at the circular destination in accordance with an amount of money for a contract in the document and of deciding a user having an identifier in the duty table coincident with a kind of the document and a preparing person's post as a user at a circular destination.
The prior art does not consider the case where the transmitter is not required to confirm the designation of the user at a transmission destination upon transmission of a document particularly, the case where there is no necessity that the user at a transmission destination is uniquely limited and the like as in the case where any user may be applied as far as the user at the transmission destination is a user who performs the process corresponding to the same duty. For example, it is assumed that the assessment work of contract that several thousands of contract documents must be assessed in a day is performed smoothly. In this case, if an amount of contract documents assessable by one person in a day is assumed to be several hundreds of cases, ten persons who have the equal power and can perform the equal assessment are required. In this case, the transmitter who has prepared the contract document to be assessed by the assessment person is not required to confirm who is an assessment person at the transmission destination of the contract document. In the prior art, however, the transmitter had to assign the assessment work to ten persons in accordance with the number described in the document so that the user at the circular destination could decide uniquely by using the decision rule of circular destination. Accordingly, there was a problem that it took time to prepare such a decision rule of circular destination and the transmitter had to confirm the designation of the user at the transmission destination unnecessarily.
Further, when the transmitter changed the designation of the user at the transmission designation, the transmitter could not understood the allocation and the burden to the user at the transmission destination of the transmitted documents. Further, there was a problem that when the transmitter wanted to transmit the document again to the user at the transmission destination who took charge of treatment of the document before, the transmitter had to change the designation of the user at the transmission destination after confirmation of the user's history indicating whether the user made the treatment or not.
Further, when the transmitter was to consult with another user who was not contained in the circular list during circulation of a document, it was necessary to perform the complicated designation that the user to be consulted was inserted into a list of the transmission destination of the document and the transmitter himself was inserted into the list so as to return the document to the transmitter again. In addition, there was a possibility that when the user to be consulted was empowered to change the transmission destination in the circular list, the designation was changed so that the transmitted document was not returned to the transmitter himself.
Furthermore, there was a problem that the transmitter had to necessarily define a proxy in the case where the document could not be treated by reason that the user at the transmission destination was absent.